Tag Archives: Marketing

Marketers commonly assume and build their campaigns based on the ‘more is better’ notion and they end up sending more emails, more invitations and event registrations to achieve greater re-targeting goals. However, engaging and winning customers’ trust takes on offering utmost personalized experiences based on their needs and respecting their preferred mode of use of their personal data. That’s why GDPR is devised – to end unethical data use practices which damage the effectiveness of the marketing campaigns.

Contrary to common belief, marketers should not consider GDPR as a hindrance, rather an opportunity to ascertain their marketing efforts will live up to customers’ expectations with ethical and personalized experience based on their preferences. With the implementation of this GDPR legislation, marketers can evaluate their present data management practices and market their products better. So, what is GDPR, actually?

What is GDPR?

May 25th, 2018 onwards, the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, based on the European Union’s (EU) new data protection framework, will take effect as the most important piece of data protection legislation. It will control organizations which use European Union (EU) resident customers’ personal data for marketing and selling products and services. The legislation will also hold rights to control marketers’ practices of tracking and web browsing behavior of EU residents. Implementing GDPR will help ensure fortifying EU residents’ rights to their data privacy wherein stringent policies will improve customers’ rights on personal data, limit processing of personal data, and will enhance transparency in using their personal data.

The term ‘personal data’ in accordance with GDPR means the set of data that will relate to the specific or identifiable person. For this, the GDPR aims at reinforcing rights to personal data of EU residents in how it can be protected and utilized. GDPR is being devised based on six major principles:

Transparency in how and in which the personal data needs to be utilized.

The personal data must be used only in the purpose for which the data got collected and was mentioned to the customers.

Reducing the procedure of collecting personal data right to the necessary steps that are required for the purpose as specified to customers.

To ascertain the accuracy of the data collected.

To check and avoid unauthorized collection or use of data and loss of the data by deploying necessary data security procedures.

Furthermore, a new accountability is now required to show how compliance will be implemented, managed and monitored. This will also demonstrate and protect how and why personal records get collected and used.

Now the question is – to whom will this GDPR legislation be applicable?

The GDPR legislation will be applicable to all organizations marketing products or services as well as monitoring web browsing behaviors of EU residents – whether these organizations are operating within or outside the European Union.

In a nutshell, if your business is marketing to and using personal data of Europeans, then this GDPR legislation is applicable to you. Moreover, if your business fails to comply with the legislation, then large penalties are to be borne by your organization which can be as much as 4% of your annual worldwide turnover or €20 million, whichever will be greater.

How to get consent from EU customers under GDPR?

The term ‘Consent’ under the GDPR means -

“which is freely given, whether specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s wishes by which he or she, by a statement or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her”.

There will be ‘affirmative action’ to help collect customers’ consent specific to the purpose for which the data is getting collected and used before marketers will process the same data as well as respecting and protecting customers’ preferences. Also, in terms of customer preferences, which may vary at times, this also can be regulated by GDPR which will state organizations must enable their customers to make changes in their choices and even withdraw their consent, as and when they want to. All organizations will require auditing, evaluating, and identifying all existing data points wherein they are collecting personal records for marketing pursuits.

After GDPR implementation, all marketers are required to provide links or references to online privacy policy and statement in their online forms which they use for collecting data. The references will inform customers of:

Purposes in which the data will be intended to be processed

Tenure for which the records can be stored

Criteria that can be set in order to regulate the period

Legal grounds of processing personal records collected

Contact details of data controller and representative in EU

Type of recipients who will receive the data when distributed

Details on international transfers of data

Detailed information on customers’ rights to restrict the processing of their personal data

Customers’ rights to revoke consent to process data

Customers’ rights to get authority for supervision

If there is a contractual or statutory requirement in terms of provision of data and if customers are obligated to furnish their records.

Probable consequences when customers fail to provide any specific data

The requirement of automated decision-making, consequences of processing for the data subject and significant information about the rationale behind it.

How Marketo will help your campaigns comply with GDPR?

Marketo will help marketers comply with the General Data Protection Regulation legislation by enabling them to incorporate a ‘Consent Field’ to every form which will be intended to collect personal data of EU residents. Lead Fields which will be required to document customers’ consent include:

Consent to Processing

“Consent Last Updated”

“Consent Notes” (which states purposes for which the data will be processed as well as information on past records of consent given should be documented here)

Do you need in-depth information on General Data Protection Regulation and how to implement the legislation in your marketing campaigns? You can simply get in touch with us with your GDPR queries at (408) 502 6765 or via services@ShowMeLeads.com. Additionally, you can check out latest updates on our social pages Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Are you planning to migrate marketing resources to account-based marketing? ABM gives these large clients just what they want – personalized services and deeper engagement. Account-based marketing strategies are more effective for a business when it is targeting larger customers with specific customized services and more personalized communications. That’s why the key to achieve success in account-based marketing must begin with identifying high-value customers who can drive return on your investments of marketing resources to engage those target accounts.

If you are to begin the account-based marketing for your business and searching for a roadmap to success, following six actionable steps will enable you to drive for success in ABM.

Step 1: Identify high-value accounts

Marketers should use firmographic data (details on the target account organizations including their annual revenue, growth, employees, hierarchy, leadership team and specific important employees and their job function). At the same marketers should also pay attention to other details to find accounts that are influential to markets such as business intelligence data (or BI) to extract and analyze raw data on potential businesses and influence of those accounts in the market, chances of conversion and higher profit margins.

Step 2: Spot key internal players

After you have delved into the organizational data and identified the right kinds of target accounts, you need to identify the specific employees who will be the key decision makers in deals that you are about to make. That’s why it is important to understand the hierarchy and job functions in detail for each client, to understand specifically how their influence will play out in the negotiation and the deal. For this, marketers can seek such data from the sales development team; they can set a related market survey in motion, or simply purchase or source from a third-party market research data.

Step 3: Create personalized content & messages

Since the central idea of account-based marketing is to deliver more custom solutions and engage targeted accounts with personalized communications – this step is quite significant. Many marketers try to entice their targeted accounts by putting clients’ business name on their web banner ads but this tactic has not been proven enough effective in ensuring purchase. Instead, marketers should aim at deepening engagement from their accounts with valuable and usable content related to the clients’ problem areas and their major business challenges. Plan your content and communications in ways that target your clients’ main concern and will explain how your products/content/solutions can help them addressing those pain points.

Step 4: Define best channels to connect

To properly segment your content in ways that enable you to engage effectively with your clients, marketers need to decide on the best channels to connect to their target audience. Whether it is email blast, drip email marketing campaigns, direct marketing, web ads, mobile marketing, social channels or print media – figure out the optimal media and channel before you start circulating the content and messages. You need to remember that not all channels are equally effective for all client accounts and for certain people involved in those accounts. There should be a coordinated effort between marketing and sales survey teams in looking for the channels where accounts and key influencers can be found. You should also consider the type of industry they are in, the region where they are operating, opt-in rules to build your list for that channel and other essential considerations to adopt the right channel strategy for account-based marketing campaign.

Step 5: Well-synced, targeted campaign

Once your content and messages are ready with a great channel strategy in place and geared up to begin your account-based marketing campaign, you still need to evaluate the efficacy of the campaign so that key decision makers, leadership teams and other people playing important role in the purchase can engage with it. Marketo users can use ABM tools embedded in the marketing automation platform and leverage tools such as real-time personalization to optimize for key influencers, personalized ad banners for web and social channels, the Ad Bridge tool that ultimately bridges the gap between key players and marketer and assures that the campaigns are targeted and coordinated between marketing and sales team. Marketo als offers an excellent tool set that will enable you to follow up and monitor your campaigns using the different kinds of metrics needed by the marketing and sales teams.

Step 6: Monitor, measure & optimize

The importance of monitoring, measuring, following up with more optimized messages and solutions bring us to the last step of account-based marketing success recipe. Like other marketing strategies, account-based marketing also needs painstaking and accurate monitoring and analysis to test and ensure the performance of your campaigns. With ABM, marketers might be running multiple campaigns, and they need to use diverse metrics for different types of campaigns they are running to see if the campaigns are yielding enough reach and web visits, engagements, responses over campaigns, appointments, scope for sale conversion and revenue from potential accounts. Make sure your sales and marketing teams coordinate to discuss the metrics they are using and their key findings from the analytics they use for evaluating the success of ABM campaigns.

Do you find these tips useful or need professional guidance for campaigns? Share your concern, challenge or requirement below or connect us through LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Periodic data health check is an essential practice to ensure clean data for better targeting, engagement and conversion. Here, we will discuss how to audit data and best practices to follow for data cleansing in order to maintain the quality and accuracy of data and thus, improve your campaign performance, conversion and ROI.

If your lead contact database contains a considerable number of outdated, invalid, incomplete and duplicate records, then, chances are that your lead scoring could be inaccurate and you may be spending more than you need to thanks to such poor data health. Poor data health will lead your campaigns to unsuitable or wrong contact details – as a result, your marketing campaigns will try to engage people who might not be interested in your product, service or offers, or who might report your emails and content as spam.

We’ve identified five ways that clean data can help your marketing performance and your marketing ROI:

Clean data helps in better Lead Scoring and Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics tools enable businesses to distinguish the ideal audience and accounts they need to focus on. Recently, marketers take into account more data points than job titles, in order to take a deep dive into their prospects. The more details they get, they more accurately they can score customers and map them into the right nurturing plan – and the better they get to know their buying behavior and buying intentions. Thus, marketers need to keep incorporating into their database an extensive range of fields which will help them to perform better lead scoring.

Clean data aids in buyers-driven campaigns

Accurate and clean contact dataset benefits marketers with intelligent information that lets them segment contacts based on prospects’ engagement and intentions. The better marketers can segment, classify, and personalize, the more effectively they can target their prospects and lead them through the buying phase. In that way, businesses can achieve better engagement and deliver more personalized content and experience and run lesser risks of unsubscription.

Clean data boosts performance

Once bad, duplicate, inaccurate or null data is eliminated with a data cleansing process, marketers can focus on completing incomplete data and incorporating with up-to-date. Thus, it is only clean contact records which will enable them to align the right information and content with the right contacts who would be interested and engaged with the communications. In other words, if your marketing campaigns are failing to target or to catch the pulse of the audience, despite relevant and useful content being communicated, it is time to do a data health check and data cleansing.

Enhanced account based marketing

After you have scored your leads, identified them as high-value prospects and want to put them nurturing program – you need to delve deeper on high-value customers to bridge all the communication gaps and feed them with the right information, tips, guides, updates and resources at the right time. Deep account-based marketing needs coordination between sales, marketing and customer service team and updating data collected on accounts from each end of ABM operations. When data collected from all the teams are incorporated, updated and modified in the database, marketers can take well-informed actions and strategies in pursuing key accounts.

Do you find this information useful? If you are interested in going to the next step and get tips on data cleansing and improve data accuracy – read our next blog post on how to do your own data cleansing and health check.

For Marketers, email marketing is one of the important marketing tactics that provide direct line of communication from conversion to sale. At one end, many believe it to be an old-fashioned technique while at other end; it is believed to a powerful tactic, when used with strong content marketing approach. Email marketing indeed moves conversation about business to a personal environment. It is a direct line of communication that turns up conversation to sale. Moreover, it is a cost-effective technique that brings upon improved returns. So, if you want to move from conversation to commerce let the wand of email marketing spell its charm and attract visitors.

I found these 5 simple tips that helped and my customer with mastering email marketing.

1. Segmenting Audience with Clear Goal
Defining a clear goal is one of the important steps for effective and successful email marketing. Keeping the same in mind, marketers need to segment audience on basis of age, gender, site usage, geographic location, email engagement, etc. The segmentation makes sure that the campaign message is delivered to the right people.

2. Compelling Headline with Personalized and Relevant Content
Marketers should also keep in mind that headline or subject line should be attractive enough to attract viewers to open and read the email. Once opened, it should have quality and relevant content with personalized message. The clear and concise message sans jargons should be delivered.

3. Brand Optimization
The email should use brand names in field forms, display logo completely, reflect the design of website, use brand colours and email address from recognized domain. Such an optimized message presents clear information with vivid images to make prospects aware of the same.

4. Creating Call-to-Action
A well designed email should always have a clear call-to-action such that after conveying the right message to right people, it can instigate them to take an action and proceed further. It should be an appropriate location. The design of the mail should lead users towards call-to-action. High lightening the same to make it grab attention is considered to be a lot effective. Creating a sense of urgency and making it persuasive is further believed to be lot helpful.

5. Tracking the Analytics
It is just not important to design in an email, but also to look into the related stats to check out open-rate and click-through to analyze the real growth. The figures would give you the clear insight of the success of the campaign. These numbers would also be useful in measuring returns of email campaigns, based on leads, sales and other activities.

These simple yet powerful 5 tips can be the main foundation of your email marketing too and you could definitely improve upon brand identity and online visibility using this simple, easy and cost-effective marketing technique. Would love to know if there are some other tips which you found would be great to go in this list!